Beliefs About How to Get Promoted - Beliefs for Promotion

Beliefs About How to Get Promoted

Wenqi Han and Daehee Choi

UMEI 013 II

July 27 2011

Everybody has a dream for their own life. A person may want to get a stable job. Another person may vaguely want just a better life. Whatever we want, we have to succeed in our work. How can we succeed in our work? In other words, how can we get promoted in our job? Everybody wants to know that. However, nobody can confidently tell us which way is the best for promotion. The purpose of our research is to find out the differences of their beliefs of how to get promoted between common students, teachers, office workers and the experts who publish articles and books on this topic. Firstly, we researched several articles and books about the experts' suggestions on promotion. Secondly, we conducted a survey to find out beliefs about how to get promoted.

According to Stephen R. Covey, effective people have 7 habits for their job (Covey, 61). First of all, being active and being prepared for new tasks, especially for a negative or difficult one. Next, understanding and keeping in mind the tasks from start to finish can help us to get a higher possibility to success. Moreover, the ability to set priorities, working for profits for both sides, and seeking first to understand, then to be understood should be borne in mind. Finally, being willing to cooperate and being a good team player, as well as taking opportunities for professional development are the keys to succeed (Covey, 65, 95, 145, 204, 235, 261, and 287).1 However, we find these seven habits are slightly different from what we believe. For instance, one of our teammates, who has worked for 12 years, thinks that a close relationship to executives is the most important fact. In addition, showing professional leadership ability, great quality of work, length of service, and earning respects from others are of considerable influence on promotion. Therefore, we made a questionnaire to collect the information of what people believe is very important for them to get promoted. You can see the survey in the attachment.

For our survey, the general objective was to detect people's beliefs about a promotion. The specific objectives were: (1) To figure out general factors for a promotion; (2) To establish which factor is the most important for a promotion; (3) To detect the different thinking for a promotion among several groups of people; and (4) To provide the way of promotion from experts.

In the survey questionnaire, we prepared two types of questions. One type was choice of importance, and the other type was a short-answer question. We asked these questions to 38 people and all of them answered. They had different jobs such as office workers, students and teachers. Also they had different nationalities such as American, Chinese,